LinkedIn Ads Get Social Network Enhancement

LinkedIn has recently launched a new ad format to integrate member activities into their advertising. The idea behind it all is to make LinkedIn ads highly relevant, timely, and useful to you by leveraging the wisdom of your network when appropriate. The ad format is quite similar to the way Facebook has been shifting to social ads over the past year, and doesn’t come as a surprise given the social nature of the site and recent growth of the company.

LinkedIn has begun rolling out changes to their advertising platform across the site, surfacing network related actions such as recommendations and companies that others are following. LinkedIn wants to present ads that are more useful and relevant to you.

Here a couple of examples that illustrate the changes that LinkedIn has made. The first is a recruitment ad, making it easier for those job seekers to land a job by showing them people in their own personal network who could potentially refer them directly.The second example is from LinkedIn’s self-service advertising solution known as LinkedIn Ads. These ads show public actions of users within your network, including the number of followers of the company that’s advertising, and also product recommendations. This type of information is used to help you decided whether you should take the time to learn more about the advertised product or service. LinkedIn has already begun displaying the ads to a small sample of users as part of a limited release.

Similarly to Facebook, the personalized content within the ads, such as your name and image, is never shared with any advertiser. You have full control over all LinkedIn privacy settings, and can even opt out of the ads at any given time. LinkedIn will be rolling out personalized ads in phases over the next few weeks.

LinkedIn went public back in May and posted $79.3 million in advertising revenues back in 2010, which is double that of 2009.

What do you think of the new ads? Do you see yourself interacting more with social ads?